Tag Archives: United

Good morning everyone, happy Friday! By the time you read this post, I will be flying down to La Paz, Bolivia for the start of my Central / South America trip. A few weeks ago, I booked a flight for my brother to Maui, Hawaii. The flight is in mid April and the cost of the ticket was kind of pricey ($500+), but luckily I found United Airlines award space for the flights he wanted. Unfortunately, United Airlines charges 45,000 miles + $11.20 in taxes/fees for a roundtrip flight in economy. Luckily, Singapore Airlines only charges 35,000 miles for the same roundtrip flight in economy to Hawaii. In this post, I will show you how I easily booked an award ticket for my brother using Singapore Airlines miles and how adding him as a redemption nominee made the process even easier.

Hola amigos! My friend Jim and I am heading south of the border (and hemisphere) for a few days and visiting the following cities around Central / South America:

La Paz, Bolivia (LPB)

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia (UYU)

Guatemala City, Guatemala (GUA)

San Salvador, El Salvador (SAL)

Managua, Nicaragua (MGA)

Liberia, Costa Rica (LIR)

If you want to see those cities plotted on a map, here is the Great Circle Mapper view. I left out the flights to/from San Francisco, the airline routing, and bus ride, otherwise the map would be too messy.

Good morning everyone, I hope you had a great weekend. I was in freezing Chicago over the weekend for the FTU Travel Expo / Signature travel conference. I arrived late Saturday afternoon because I took a $500 bump from United Airlines, stayed the night at an SFO airport hotel and got on a Saturday morning flight to Chicago. When I finally arrived, I picked up a few travel tips from the sessions and one on one conversations. I will try to cover some of the public travel tips I learned this week. Don’t worry, your secrets are safe with me.

Question… wouldn’t it be cool if you could see legroom for different flights on different airlines in Google Flights? Yes, it is possible. All you need to do is install the Legrooms extension to your Google Chrome browser. I will walk you through all the steps the 1 step. Also, while researching this post, I realized this was covered months ago by several travel blogs, but somehow I missed all those blog posts, so maybe this helps a few people like me. Here is the basic Google Flights view:

You might recall from a few months ago that I went to the San Diego Airport to gift my expiring United Airlines Club passes to two lucky people who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was a fun way to spend a few hours, and it mostly went smoothly! Looks like United Airlines has gone the digital route with these club passes as of November 2017.

Here’s the letter I received. You’ll notice that United will now be automatically adding these passes to our accounts within four weeks of our Chase United MileagePlus Credit Card anniversary date.

To say Basic Economy fares are frustrating and confusing is an understatement. Regardless of how often you travel, this fare category is something we all need to understand, especially so we don’t book these fares without intentionally meaning to. That’s what happened to my friend. Maybe it’s happened to you too? She’s not blaming the airlines, though. She didn’t quite understand and didn’t pay good attention to what she was booking. But she won’t make that mistake again! In talking to her, I realized it would be a good idea to explain what Basic Economy fares mean and to understand what restrictions are placed on your ticket.

The three legacy airlines all have a Basic Economy category. Delta was the first one to introduce these fares, but now United and American Airlines have them as well. Each of them have their own set of restrictions. In general, though, the restrictions usually mean: NO advance seat selection, NO carry-on baggage allowances (your personal item will have to fit under the seat in front of you), last to board, NO accruing miles for the trip, fares are non-refundable and non-changeable, and other restrictions. Delta’s policy is slightly different on a few of these, so check each airline carefully. The legacy airlines see this as competing with what we might call the Low Cost Carriers such as Southwest and JetBlue. Or competing with the Ultra Low Cost Carriers such as Frontier and Spirit.